Matrimony (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Joshua Henkin

  Now the empty beer cans were collecting on the floor and Carter was saying, “I love you, Wainwright, I love you, man,” and he hugged Julian so hard he almost knocked the wind out of him. Really, Carter said, they were going to be writers someday. “You’re a fucking sophomoric, pusillanimous writer, both of us are, the only two talents in the class.” Carter was laughing, and then it seemed he was going to cry, and now, embarrassed, he said, “Hey, you dork!” and he kneed Julian hard in the leg.

  Then they went camping together. They were in the car, and Carter was talking about virginity again. According to him, a girl could get her virginity back.

  “Retrieve it?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  “How?”

  “Surgery,” Carter said. “It’s for born-agains, mostly. Doctors are reinserting the girl’s hymen. You know how on a movie set a guy gets shot and there’s blood all over the place but he’s really just bleeding ketchup? Well, it’s the same idea. A girl gets a new hymen but it’s not really a new hymen. It’s a fake new hymen.”

  “Made of ketchup?”

  “Made of who knows what. It’s mostly for born-agains, like I said. Some kind of Pentecostal medical ritual. Not that you’d have to be a born-again. But why else would you do it?”

  “Why would anyone do it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  At the campground where they pitched tent, Julian was learning new things about Carter, such as the fact that Carter could imitate a loon. Carter was so eerily adept at imitating a loon that when Julian closed his eyes he thought Carter was a loon. So did the loons themselves. Carter was leading them in a chorus of calling.

  “That’s fucking fantastic,” Julian said.

  Carter shrugged. “I’ve got perfect pitch. I was born with it, I guess.”

  “I can do this with my tongue,” Julian said. He curled up his tongue into three segments so it resembled a cauliflower.

  “That’s excellent,” Carter said.

  “It’s retarded,” said Julian.

  “Sure it’s retarded. But it’s also excellent.”

  For dinner, Julian and Carter grilled hot dogs, and they wrapped corn and potatoes in tin foil and tossed them into the fire and ate those, too. By the time he was done eating, Julian felt so full he could barely move and he beached himself on the hood of the car. He lay on his back, his arms spread to the sides, looking at the sky through a knot of branches. “The thing about hot dogs is, once they’re inside you the pieces come back together again. It’s like they’re guided by some magnetic force.”

  “Hot dogs,” Carter said, “are made entirely of cow testicles. Except for the parts made of pig testicles.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Julian said.

  Carter handed him a stick with five roasted marshmallows on it. “You know what marshmallows are made of?”

  “Some other kind of testicles?”

  “I suspect so,” Carter said.

  In the tent that night they talked about the fact that they were two guys who weren’t half bad-looking, so why were they camping alone?

  In Carter’s opinion, it all came down to evolutionary biology. How else could you explain Henry Kissinger who, if the rumors were to be believed, was a lothario. Anyone who had seen Henry Kissinger recognized in him a familiar figure from their past, the kid from their high school class who was smarter than everyone else but who didn’t have any friends. Henry Kissinger had orchestrated the Vietnam War. He’d bombed the Indochinese and lived to tell about it to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars a speech. Never mind the starving children in Ethiopia and Cambodia. If any evidence was needed that the world was an unjust place, all one had to do was consider Henry Kissinger’s sex life. Henry Kissinger was ugly and corrupt; he was a war criminal. But he was a war criminal with sex appeal.

  Julian said, “Maybe girls like it when you bomb people. You know, maybe they find it erotic.”

  “That’s part of it,” Carter said. “Henry Kissinger’s older than we are, right?”

  Julian nodded.

  “He’s older than we are, he’s wealthier than we are, and he’s more powerful than we are, so girls like that. They’re looking for someone to protect their offspring. They think they’re looking for something else, but they don’t have a clue. It’s the same with us. We like girls who are hot.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, we think we like girls who are hot, but subconsciously, evolutionarily, we like girls who are fertile.”

  “A hot girl is a fertile girl,” Julian said.

  “The problem is, the fertile girls don’t like us back. Evolution’s got us by the balls.” Carter looked up at the inside of the tent, as if hoping it would provide an answer to their predicament. “The one consolation is Henry Kissinger is having empty sex.”

  “You think?”

  “Definitely. Guys like Henry Kissinger who were what they were in high school spend the rest of their lives compensating. Nothing makes Henry Kissinger satisfied.”

  “Not even the sex?”

  “I’m telling you,” Carter said, “the man’s unhappy. He’s very depressed.”

  But Carter himself was depressed. At least that was what Julian thought as Carter’s story “Boat People” was discussed in class. Because Professor Chesterfield, instead of doing what he usually did, which was allow the class to attack the story before following with a more sustained attack of his own, forbade all discussion of Carter’s story and read it aloud from start to finish, after which he said, “This story is brilliant, it’s publishable.”

  But later, in the dorms, Carter seemed so glum it was as if he hadn’t heard the praise.

  “The world’s greatest curmudgeon called you brilliant, Heinz, and all you can do is sulk? Do you know what I’d give to have Chesterfield say my story is publishable?”

  “Then I wish it had been you.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Who cares how well I write? I’ll still be mopping people’s floors.” As part of his work-study package, Carter was required to clean the dormitory bathrooms of the very students he went to class with. It didn’t help—it made matters worse, in fact—that Julian refused to let Carter clean his bathroom, that he even volunteered to join Carter on his work-study days and, bucket in tow, help him mop the floors and brush the toilet bowls of the students down the hall. “What’s with the noblesse oblige?” Carter said. “Who do you think you are? The welfare state?”

  Then winter break came, and when Carter said he wasn’t returning to California—he couldn’t afford the ticket, he admitted—Julian insisted he come home with him. “At least come for Christmas dinner,” Julian said. “My mother’s an amazing cook.”

  On the drive to the city, Carter was silent, pretending to sleep, and no matter how hard Julian tried, he couldn’t get Carter to talk to him.

  When they arrived in New York, Julian, hoping to impress Carter, took him to the Empire State Building, where they rode the elevator to the observation deck and dropped quarters into the telescopes. “Oh, man, I can see Europe,” Julian said, and Carter said, “You’re facing the wrong direction.” Julian fed more quarters into the telescope, and now, pointing the telescope at the building across from them, he said, “Oh, man, that girl’s naked,” and for an instant he had Carter fooled and Carter stepped forward to look through the telescope.

  Then they were down the elevator and into a cab, which expelled them into the maw of Grand Central Station. Across from the newsstand, the shoeshine men were huddled like supplicants at the businessmen’s feet. Grand Central Station looked resplendent on Christmas Eve, a young woman like a marsupial carrying her baby in a pouch, a man returning home with a baguette from Zaro’s, everyone headed to where the holiday would take them. Julian so wanted to be a part of it all that he sat down in front of a shoeshine man, only to realize he was wearing sneakers. He didn’t care. He would have the shiniest sneakers in all of New York. He gave the shoeshine man a five-dollar ti
p and he and Carter went back uptown, where late that night, on a friend’s rooftop, they looked down at Manhattan shimmering beneath them. They drank a few beers and were playing cards, and Carter seemed more lighthearted than he’d been all day, for he was tossing bottle caps off the roof, shouting “Merry Christmas!” to the pedestrians seventeen stories below them.

  But the next morning, Carter was sullen again.

  “What’s wrong, Heinz? Bee in your bonnet?”

  “No.”

  “Freshman slump? Overcome by ennui?”

  At Christmas dinner, Julian’s father, in a jacket and tie, sat at one end of the table, and Julian’s mother, in an evening dress, sat at the other, and Julian and Carter, on opposite sides, sat in the middle. Two candles in silver holders had been placed at the center of the table and Julian’s mother had folded the napkins in such a way that they appeared to be standing and bowing to you. Julian’s mother was lovely, with limpid green eyes and auburn curls, and Julian caught Carter staring at her.

  Julian’s father peered at Carter from behind horn-rimmed glasses. He was a robust man with a thick chest and an expression of impenetrability, and his hair, which was black with flecks of gray, looked as if you couldn’t have mussed it up if you’d tried. “How are you enjoying college?” he asked Carter.

  “It’s all right.”

  “What classes are you taking?”

  Carter listed them. “Anthropology, Spanish Two, ‘The Biological Bases of Human Behavior,’ and ‘Fiction Writing.’ That’s how I know Julian,” he said. “From fiction writing class.”

  “Do you like writing fiction?”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Whether he likes it or not,” Julian said, “he’s the star of the class.”

  Carter, reddening, stared down at his plate.

  “What have you been writing?” Julian’s mother asked.

  “Just some short stories,” Carter said, and it was clear that he didn’t want to talk about this.

  “Where did you grow up?” Julian’s father asked.

  “Sausalito, California,” Carter said. “Just north of San Francisco.”

  “And your family still lives there?”

  Carter nodded.

  “What does your father do?”

  “He’s in business.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She’s a librarian.”

  “Tell me about Sausalito,” Julian’s father said, and Carter, holding his fork in the air, a piece of ham impaled on it, appeared not to know what to say. So Julian’s father coaxed him along, asking what the population of Sausalito was and whether there was any local industry, and Carter, who didn’t know the answer to these questions, responded with a mumble and a shrug, as if the fact that he didn’t know the population of Sausalito meant he couldn’t possibly live there.

  Later that night, lying in his old bunk bed, Julian said, “I should have warned you about my father. He’s the Grand Inquisitor.”

  Carter was quiet.

  “Sometimes I wish he’d just cease and desist.”

  “I take it you don’t like him,” Carter said.

  “Oh, he’s all right,” said Julian. “I love him, I suppose. He’s my father, after all. Not that I see him very often.” Through his bedroom window, Julian could make out the Pepsi-Cola sign on the banks of the East River and, behind it, Queens. He could hear Carter breathing in the bunk bed beneath him.

  “I can’t believe you grew up here,” Carter said. “This apartment’s amazing.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you have any idea how high the ceilings are? And the moldings? They look like something Michelangelo carved. If I ever have this kind of money, you can be sure I’ll appreciate it.”

  “I appreciate it,” Julian said, but Carter was silent, and Julian could tell he didn’t believe him.

  Across from him, he could see the coin machine his father had bought him, years ago for his birthday. It separated the coins by denomination; then you arranged them in rolls and took them to the bank. From the start, his father had tried to teach him about finance. He wanted Julian to grow up to be an investment banker, to take over the firm from him.

  “Sure, I grew up wealthy,” Julian said, “but my father was at work until midnight and I’d have traded it all if he just came home for dinner a few nights a week.”

  “Lots of money, little love?”

  “I suppose. It was basically me and my mother and I liked it most of the time. I had a classic Oedipus complex: I wanted to kill my father and marry my mother. But I also had it in reverse, because in a way it was my father I missed most. I wanted us to play sports and card games, do father-and-son kinds of things, but that hardly ever happened. My father wanted me to go to Yale. He was hoping I would be him in miniature, but I wasn’t going to be that, and even if I had, we wouldn’t have spent any more time together.”

  “What about your mother?” Carter asked. “Did she want you to go to Yale, too?”

  Julian shook his head. “If I’d been a girl she’d have wanted me to go to Wellesley, but as it was I’d have had to go in drag.”

  “Your mother’s beautiful,” Carter said.

  “I guess.” Julian had heard this before and it made him proud, but also vaguely uncomfortable. He slid out of bed, with Carter following him, and padded down the hallway.

  In the kitchen, he took out a cup that said té on it. He opened a drawer and removed his old baby bib, which said bébé across the front. “My mother’s pretentious,” he said. “She majored in French in college, but that’s no excuse. Do you know what she called the stroller she used to wheel me in? A poussette.” He guided Carter into the guest bathroom, where the faucets said “c” for chaud and “f” for froid. He was the only child in America, he liked to say, who grew up thinking “c” stood for “hot.”

  But now, back in bed, he was enveloped by fonder memories, of the school lunches his mother had packed for him, the cucumber and Camembert sandwiches in their Baggies, the Granny Smith apple slices that accompanied them. He thought of the times his parents had traveled, how his mother would write him before she and his father left so he would receive a letter on the day they departed. Every afternoon when they were gone he would wait impatiently for the mail to arrive. He still had the letters his parents had sent him, the blue par avion envelopes with the airplane on the outside that he’d unsealed with his father’s gold letter opener.

  “My father had a younger brother,” Julian said. “His name was Lowell, and when my father was four and Lowell was three they were playing catch in front of the house and Lowell got killed by a hit-and-run driver. My father never talks about it—I’ve never heard him mention his brother’s name—but it changed him forever. At least that’s what my mother says.”

  “Do you doubt it?”

  “No,” Julian said. “I’m sure it’s true. It’s just hard for me to imagine my father as a four-year-old.” He leaned over the bed, and from where he was lying, all he could make out was Carter’s face in the dark, the pale oval like a moon. He glanced down the hall to the row of closets, each with a mirror on the outside; if you opened the closet doors and lined the mirrors up you saw yourself replicated many times over. Sometimes even now he would arrange the mirrors that way, half expecting to see his former self reflected back at him instead of the young man he had become.

  “I don’t get it,” Carter said. “Why, if you were an only child, did you sleep in a bunk bed?”

  “I wanted a sibling,” Julian explained, “and I thought if I got a bunk bed my parents might fill it.” In the dark, he could see the posters on the walls, the newspaper clippings and pennants from the 1970s, the photographs from Sports Illustrated of Walt Frazier, Earl Monroe, Jerry Lucas, and Bill Bradley. “Heinz?”

  Carter was silent.

  “Have you gone to sleep?”

  “I was just thinking,” Carter said.

  “About what?”

  “How I�
�m staying over at your apartment and I guess we’ve become good friends, but you really know nothing about me.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Do you realize how different my parents are from yours?”

  “Tell me about them,” Julian said. “Your mother’s a librarian?”

  “For elementary school kids,” Carter said dismissively.

  “At least it’s books. I can’t remember the last time my father read a novel. My mother probably reads a couple of novels a year, but they’re not the kinds of books you and I would read.”

  “My mother shows six-year-olds what a card catalogue is. I wouldn’t romanticize it.” Carter looked up. “Do you think you understand me, Wainwright?”

  “I hope I do.”

  “Because I’m not sure you ever will.”

  “Try me, then.”

  So Carter began to speak. He had grown up in Marin County, he explained, where all his classmates were richer than he was. And money was only part of it. His friends’ parents were on the faculty of U.C. Berkeley, they were board members of the San Francisco Ballet, they were partners at Morrison & Foerster and other prominent law firms. It was even worse when he got to prep school. A tenth-grader when the other students had already been there for a year, a scholarship kid, and everything about him said he was from somewhere else. “According to the school brochure, the students came from thirty-seven states and fifteen foreign countries, but everyone I met was from New England, and they looked at me the way they looked at everyone from California. As if we were tarot card readers. A bunch of B actors like Ronald Reagan.”